


give me one night (i'll steal all the others when you turn your back)

by littletrenchcoatangel



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: I'm not sure if this counts as underage, M/M, SO, but Stiles is most likely still a junior, i didn't really specify, or whatever you call them, yeah - Freeform, you can choose how old you want him to be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-27
Updated: 2012-11-27
Packaged: 2017-11-19 16:27:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/575277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littletrenchcoatangel/pseuds/littletrenchcoatangel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What are you doing here, Stiles?” Derek asks, when Stiles opens the door and slides out to stand in front of him.</p><p>“I-” Stiles starts, then pauses. He takes a deep breath and wraps his hand around the jeep keys in his pocket. “Can I spend the night?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	give me one night (i'll steal all the others when you turn your back)

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by this graphic: http://scottiemccall.tumblr.com/post/33700136685 (I'm sorry. I don't know how to make a hyperlink on AO3 yet. :/)
> 
> Let me know what you think! :)
> 
> (no seriously. kudos/comments = happiness for me = more fics for you)

It starts out innocently enough - Stiles’ dad is out of town for the weekend at a police conference; Erica, Isaac and Boyd are on a field trip for a class at school and Scott is risking his life on a weekend camping trip with Allison and her dad. Stiles doesn’t want to spend the night alone, not after everything that’s happened with the Alpha pack, and, after an hour of mindlessly tossing and turning in an attempt to sleep, he makes up his mind and drives out to the old Hale house.

His headlights catch on the windows on the front wall of the house, reflecting back at Stiles and momentarily blinding him, and it doesn’t surprise him when he looks over and sees that Derek is already outside, making his way over to the jeep.

“What are you doing here, Stiles?” he asks, when Stiles opens the door and slides out to stand in front of him.

“I-” Stiles starts, then pauses. He takes a deep breath and wraps his hand around the jeep keys in his pocket. “I don’t want to - you know, be - uh, be alone. After - with the Alpha pack. It’s - I’m still not -” and even though he practiced it the whole time he was driving over, he can’t get out his explanation, so. “Would it be okay if I - can I spend the night?”

 

Derek gets a look on his face that Stiles recognises as understanding - it’s only a little shocking to see on Derek’s face, even though he’s opened up a little since they started renovating his house; cleaning the proverbial skeletons out of his closet, and the real ones out of his basement - and nods, turning silently to lead the way inside.

Inside the house, in one of the bedrooms that has been fully renovated, Derek and the pack have laid out a couple of old mattresses that they picked up from the goodwill and made them into something resembling a bed. Usually, when the whole pack - Erica, Isaac, Boyd (and sometimes Jackson and Scott) - is there, they’ll forgo the blankets and sleep in a poor imitation of a puppy pile, but as Derek disappears somewhere through another doorway, Stiles can see that there’s a single pillow and a threadbare blanket taking up one of the mattresses, so he assumes this is what Derek does when it’s just him. Derek returns a moment later and hands Stiles another pillow and a few blankets before he climbs back onto the mattress and busies himself with reorganising his blanket. Stiles follows suit, setting up quickly enough on the mattress furthest from Derek, and mutters a quick ‘thank you’ before he falls asleep.

When Stiles wakes up in the morning to the sun shining in through the window across from him, Derek is gone, but that’s okay. He climbs out of bed, folds the blankets and goes home. It’s not until he’s halfway through cooking dinner for his dad that night that he remembers he’d fallen asleep on the left hand side of the mattress with two blankets, and he’d woken up on the right hand side with three.

~*~*~*~

After that, it becomes almost expected. Whenever the pack (who are suspiciously okay with the new development) is gone, or the sheriff is out of town, or both, Stiles will pack himself up, shake himself off, and spend the night at Derek’s. Derek eventually resorts to leaving a pile of blankets in the corner of the room so that Stiles can just come in and go straight to sleep, saving the alpha the trouble of having to get out of bed. Sometimes Stiles doesn’t even bother to leave after pack meetings, instead choosing to just leave a backpack with all of his necessities at Derek’s house.

And if, every morning, without fail, Stiles wakes up on the opposite side of the mattress to the one he fell asleep on, well, he blames it on his body subconsciously seeking warmth.

(Even if, and especially when, on some occasions, Derek is still there when it happens.)

~*~*~*~

When, towards the end of his senior year, the better part of a year after that first night, Stiles stops randomly spending the night, Derek doesn’t think too much of it - obviously he’d become used to Stiles’ presence in his bedroom at least one night a month (Never when it’s a full moon, though; Stiles may be impulsive, but he’s not stupid.), but it was nothing to cry about - but when Stiles stops showing up to pack meetings altogether, he starts getting suspicious. It’s not until his pack tells him that Stiles won’t talk about anything pack-related that he finally gives up and goes to his house. When he gets there, he notices that the Sheriff’s car is absent, and he thanks whatever gods that be for that, because he has no idea what’s about to happen. Taking a deep breath he didn’t know he needed, Derek approaches the front door and knocks, stepping back a little when Stiles pulls open the door almost instantly, talking before he even knows who’s there. “Hey, dude, ‘bout time you got here, I was just about to -” and here, his ‘start without you’ trails off miserably as he takes in the fact that it’s Derek, not Scott, standing on his front porch. Stiles almost makes an attempt to slam the door in Derek’s face, but the alpha shoots a hand out and stops it from moving more than an inch. Sighing, Stiles pulls the door open and lets Derek in, turning to lean back against the door when it’s closed.

“Stiles,” Derek starts, but the teen is already raising a hand to stop him.

“Look, I know what you’re here for, okay? You’re gonna say ‘Stiles, as much as you want to leave this whole supernatural deal behind, you can’t now because you’re a part of it and you’re stuck with it forever’ or you’re gonna ask me why I stopped coming to pack meetings and, okay, if that’s it, then here’s your answer: I don’t want to know what gave you the impression, but I don’t want to stop associating with you guys, despite your frequent attempts to seriously injure me, and I stopped coming to pack meetings because I need some Stiles time - don’t give me that look, that’s not what I meant and you know it. I just need space.”

Derek gives Stiles a look like he doesn’t understand, because he doesn’t, and Stiles sighs again. “There are just - there are some things I need to sort out, okay? By myself. They’re not - it’s nothing major, I just - I’m having some… personal issues. Self discovery and all that.”

Now Derek really doesn’t understand, because when Derek first met Stiles he could tell, right off the bat, that Stiles was completely comfortable with himself. He may not have been happy with himself all the time, but he was comfortable in his own skin in a way that not a lot of people are. He knew his strengths, he knew his weaknesses, and he knew what he was capable of. He wishes he could say that he could tell for sure that Stiles was lying, but his heartbeat wasn’t giving anything away - Derek was running purely on gut instinct, and his gut was telling him that there was something bigger than ‘all that’ going on.

“Stiles, what’s wrong?” And it strikes him suddenly that that’s a possibility. There could be something wrong. Someone, for all Derek knows, could be threatening him, and he’s distancing himself to protect the pack. He takes a step closer, listening closely to his breathing and his heart rate. “Is everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine! A-okay! Fine and dandy!”

“Stiles.”

“I just - Derek, it hasn’t - this isn’t easy.”

“What isn’t easy?”

“Do you know how long it took me to fall in love with Lydia?” Stiles asks, and Derek has no idea what’s going on.

“No, but-“

“It took me less than a second,” Stiles interrupts. “One moment I was convinced for all the world that girls were the most disgusting creatures on earth and the next I was planning a wedding and mentally naming my children after my favourite superheroes.”

“I don’t see what-“

“ _I didn’t even know her, Derek_. I was eight years old, I didn’t know a single thing about her except that she had strawberry-blonde hair and her eyes were green, and I was already planning my whole future with her in it. And it just got more and more insane the more I got to know her, because I created this perfect image of her in my head and I built my whole life around making her fall in love with me.”

Stiles pauses, staring at Derek as if he wants him to realise something, but Derek still has no clue how this is relevant.

“How old was I when we met, Derek?” Without giving him time to answer, Stiles powers on. “Sixteen. I was sixteen, and I knew more about you than anyone cared to remember. I was still convinced that I was in love with Lydia and all of my attention was focused on helping Scott figure out he was a werewolf. And I hated you. I mean, I didn’t hate you, I didn’t even  _know_  you, not personally, but I didn’t trust you. And then we started that mutual saving thing and I started to trust you. And then you rescued me from the Alpha pack and I realised that I was a part of your pack, that I  _am_  a part of the pack, and I trusted you so much that I came to you when I didn’t want to be alone. And you  _let me_. Because you trust me too. And, I guess, I mean, the point is - I know more about you now - I  _knew_  more about you  _then_  - than I knew about Lydia in that moment I fell in love with her and I- well after the first few times I spent the night I just started thinking about it. How crazy it was that I’d loved one person my whole life when I didn’t even know her as anything more than a smart, beautiful girl walking down the hallway like she owned the place. There was nothing personal there. And then I started comparing it to the other relationships in my life, and I got to you, and I thought, ‘this is what I want my future to be like. This is how I want to be. I want to be comfortable, I want to feel safe and protected. I want it to not feel like I’ve had to prove my worth to someone to get them to love me like I love them.’ So I had to get out, because I-“

And just as Stiles cuts himself off, looking for all the world like he wants the floor to swallow him whole, Derek realises what he’s talking about.

“Stiles, are you- are you saying that you love me?” and he can’t help the tone his voice takes - the last person that said they loved him burned his whole family alive.

Stiles won’t look at him. “If you’re going to mock me, just - just leave.”

“I-“

Stiles meets his eyes, finally, but he’s glaring. “I’m saying that I’m  _in love_  with you, Derek. I have been for a while now. And I don’t know exactly when it happened, or how, or even  _why_ , to be honest, but it did, and I’m trying to fix it. I’m trying to stop this from ruining  _everything_  and I just - I don’t want - I need some space, to figure this out. So I can - so we can go back to how it was before.”

And Derek really doesn’t understand. So he just goes with his gut instinct and steps forward, taking Stiles’ face between his hands, wiping at the wetness that’s fallen on his cheeks. “Stiles,” he says, and he doesn’t know why he’s whispering, but he is.

It’s almost endearing how Stiles tries to maintain his anger, even if it is focused more on himself than Derek. “ _What?_ ”

“I don’t want it to go back to how it was before,” and he kisses Stiles, pushing him back against the door and running his thumbs over the barely-there swell of his cheeks.

~*~*~*~

Moments later, when Derek is resting his forehead against Stiles’ as they try to catch their breath, Derek huffs a laugh and returns Stiles’ curious look with a small smile.

“So… can I spend the night?”

(This time, when Stiles wakes up, he’s on the same side of the bed he went to sleep on, he’s just replaced all his clothes with hickeys, and he’s got Derek curled around his back.)

**Author's Note:**

> /howevendoyoutitle
> 
> p.s. Thank you all so much for the kudos/comments/bookmarks on 'a rose by any other name would have just as many thorns'. You guys made my day.
> 
> p.p.s. I should probably mention the fact that I'm terrible with titles and if by any chance you find the title amazingly compelling, do not, I repeat, DO NOT expect the fic to be awesome. I generally have no idea what I'm doing when I write, so... you've been warned, I guess.
> 
> Other than that, though... have an awesome life. :P


End file.
